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TSA: Groping for Answers on Security

In times of war and danger people are often called upon to giveup something, to sacrifice for the sake of the war effort, the survival of a people, a nation or a tribe. By definition war means sacrifice. People kill. People die. People do without. That’s sacrifice.

Great leaders call forth from their people a spirit and willingness to sacrifice–to fight against the gathering storm, knowing that many will wither before its blasts, to go any distance and bear any burden to achieve something of value for nation or just humanity. And people, when called upon with eloquence, passion and truth, usually respond with amazing generosity and bravery.

It is therefore significant that in our ill-named War on Terror we have never been asked in a straightforward manner to sacrifice much of anything. In an otherwise compelling speech following 9-11, everything George W Bush said was right and true but an important paragraph was missing: The call to sacrifice. We were told to be resolute and not to let the terrorists win by making us afraid. We were encouraged to do our economic duty and continue to shop. Shopping is not exactly a clarion call to courage.

The message has not improved under President Obama. We still fight the terrorists. They have not yet broken our spirit but the costs of two wars may break us financially and therefore spiritually. We Americans have, because of the economy, let our side down. We no longer shop with our traditional combination of denial and the abandonment of reason.

We have been frightened into becoming a nation of sheep–meekly lining up to be wanded and searched without probable cause, x-rayed with a clarity that reveals not simply our gender but, for many males, our religion.

With a kind of “double-speak” worthy of 1984 and Big Brother we are told that our freedom depends on surrendering our freedom. Our TSA people, no doubt meaning well, are constantly spending our money, wasting our time and decaying our morale by coming up with new, expensive and intrusive ways of possibly detecting an attempt on us. Like generals preparing for the previous war, our security establishment is busy developing tools and toys that might have foiled previous attacks. TSA is unwilling to share any proof that our gadgets have, in fact, stopped anyone!

Now with full body scans, we are going to be subjected to radiation. Ah, but they claim it is minimal and couldn’t hurt anyone. Please look up what our government scientists told our soldiers and their families who were called upon to witness the atomic tests in Nevada in the 50s. Look at the benign claims for Agent Orange in Vietnam. Now check the cancer statistics for both exposed populations.

But TSA is not cruel or inflexible. If you want to decline having your privates made public, then you must agree to being groped, having your groin searched for lumps and having your butt all but penetrated in search of explosive underwear. For females it is having all this plus a thorough breast examination no longer even recommended by the Cancer Association.

Still, even our current intrusive and invasive protocols would not have detected the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, nor even the terrorist who put a bomb up his rectum and attempted to blow up the Saudi head of security. Our current technology would fail at that to, the x-rays mistaking a bomb for stool.

There are answers, less costly, intrusive and far less humiliating. Profiling, for one, is a start. Random searches are stupid. El Al looks for behavioral profiles as well as ethnic. It is silly to give a child or grandmother the same attention as young males from 20 to 35 of all ethnicities. Wanding can pick up metal. Since dogs will inevitably sniff crotches, let’s just work with what God gave them and train them to react to various forms of explosives. It is doable. Dogs are cheap technology.

What we are now doing is wrong as a matter of security, social policy, law and human dignity. The scare techniques making us afraid beyond our actuarial risks will backfire. There will be push back from this Orwellian false promise of security in exchange for giving up personal privacy. Constitutionally we are promised that we will be free from unreasonable search and seizure in our homes and by extension in our person.

At last, our government calls on us to sacrifice for the war. We are asked to sacrifice our freedom, our rights and our dignity. And in exchange for our dignity do we get safety? No. We get groped.
2010 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com